...between hardware/software providers and the app developers they serve? As long as the code cannot be used harmfully, they should just sit back and enjoy the myriads of apps that pop out of all the clever developers.

Heck, when I worked for DEC my boss, Gary, (RIP, one of the most amazing programmers who ever lived) figured out a way to identify undocumented functions in the FMS libraries that were extremely useful for fine-tuning our applications.

He documented them and we used them and altho' the FMS developers warned us that their stability could not be guaranteed, they never changed AND if they had, well, we'd change our code, or just never upgrade to the version that broke our code.